Written by John
Berthelsen Thursday, 17 December
2009
Customs sits on a controversial new biography of the former
prime minister
Malaysian customs authorities have been holding up delivery of 800
copies of an authoritative new biography of former Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohamad for the past three weeks at the Port
Klang customs office.
The book, "Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent
Times," written by former Asian Wall Street Journal Managing Editor
Barry Wain, is a warts-and-all, critical but fair account of
Mahathir's 22 years in power. It is certain to become an essential
study for scholars seeking to understand the onetime premier's
reign and its consequences. But maybe not in Malaysia itself unless the locals buy through Barns
& Noble (available Jan. 10) or Amazon (Jan. 5) for
US$60.75.
Reports of the book have created considerable stir in Malaysia
after the popular Malaysiakini news website ran reports of it along
with a review first published in Asia Sentinel.
The book will probably turn up on bookshelves eventually, said one
Malaysian source. "There are lots of books on the shelves that are
critical of Dr Mahathir. It might be some of his allies that
stopped it. But everybody knows about it, it's just they're waiting
for a hard copy."
Foreign published books air-freighted into Malaysia often go
through customs without being checked, or with only a cursory check
at the airport. Books sent by ship or by land from Singapore are
often stopped for inspection, however, which can mean customs
officers spending weeks reading the material. Sometimes they just
sit on the book, leaving the publisher with little option but to
withdraw it or be faced with being hit with storage charges,
leaving the book effectively banned without the government having
to face criticism for formally banning it.
The reform organization Aliran said the holdup of the books " is
nothing short of crude and reckless censorship, although indirect,
the effect is the same. It very undemocratically denies Malaysians
reading material that should be made freely available to all and
sundry. This book is of particular interest to citizens who
are appalled by the disclosure that under Mahathir RM100 billion
could
have been squandered. They have been waiting anxiously to
find out how this atrocity involving a mammoth, mind-boggling
amount could have happened without anybody commenting on this
extravagance."
The book tells the story of an essentially pragmatic man who
managed the always-fraught balance between the country's races,
particularly the Malays and Chinese, relatively well although the
New Economic Policy which he inherited from his predecessor, an
affirmative action program for the majority race was deeply flawed,
creating an entitlement mentality among Malays that largely failed
to uplift them economically despite all efforts. Nonetheless,
Mahathir, Wain wrote, "wasted no time in transforming Malaysia in
line with his vision of a modern, industrialized nation, setting
the goal of becoming fully developed by 2020."
Rubber, palm oil and tin, the mainstays of the economy, Wain wrote,
gave way to the production of manufactured goods and embraced a
high-tech future, making Malaysia one of the developing world's
most successful countries. Mahathir, he said, "relentlessly
badgered, berated and browbeat Malaysians, especially Malays, to
shape up and convert his dreams into reality. If necessary, he
would crucify opponents, sacrifice allies and tolerate monumental
institutional and social abuses to advance his project."
Unfortunately that also produced some excesses that the country
could take decades to correct. By Wain's reckoning, the country
wasted as much as RM100 billion (US$40 billion at exchange rates at
the time) on grandiose projects such as the Perwaja steel plant,
which lost an estimated US$800 million and whose executive
director, Eric Chia, was charged with embezzling large amounts of
money. Chia, however, was freed by a Malaysian judiciary system
that Mahathir had basically gutted and rebuilt to serve the
interests of the state.
Wain writes about Mahathir's relationship with Daim Zainuddin, the
onetime finance minister who dismissed concerns about the
commingling of his public and private interests, among a wide range
of cronies who ultimately became a rentier class that did huge
damage to the country's coffers.
He could be stridently anti-western, breaking with the UK
dramatically by establishing a "Buy British Last" program that only
ended when Margaret Thatcher, then the iron prime minister of
Britain, made a trip to meet with Mahathir himself. Nonetheless,
Wain writes, Mahathir's anti-west rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s,
though reminiscent of the first generation of developing world
leaders feeling their way out from under the yoke of colonialism,
"was accompanied by a diametrically opposite view of economics.
Although a strident nationalist, he was pragmatic and favored the
market system that brought prosperity to the
industrialized nations."
Like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Indonesia's Suharto, "Dr
Mahathir integrated his country deeply with the Western economies
and achieved an enviable development record."
Wain wrote that during a visit to Washington DC in which Mahathir
met President Ronald Reagan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger
and others, he secretly launched an innocuous sounding Bilateral
Training and Consultation Treaty, which Wain described as a series
of working groups for exercises, intelligence sharing, logistical
support and general security issues. In the meantime, Mahathir
continued display a public antipathy on general principles at the
Americans while his jungle was crawling with US troops quietly
training for jungle warfare.
(On Dec. 16, Mahathir slammed what he described as Prime Minister
Najib Tun Razak's change in Malaysia's foreign policy to back the
United States in a recent flap over an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution
criticising Iran for its nuclear program.)
That's all good. But Wain's exhaustive reprise of the Bumiputra
Malaysia Finance scandal of the early 1980s, for instance, in which
as much as US$1 billion disappeared from the Hong Kong arm of the
government-owned Bank Bumiputra Malaysia, ill-starred forays into
currency manipulation by Bank Negara, the country's central bank,
which cost billions, the attempt directed by Mahathir to attempt to
corner the tin market in the early 1980s, and other huge missteps
apparently didn't set will with the government's current
leaders.
Wain's book remains on the loading docks, awaiting a decision to
deliver it. But for readers who buy Kindle or another electronic
reader, it's easy to get.
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2199&Itemid=178
